Golden week, so far: Ningbo, a lake, tea mountain and faked cities.

Confusing headline? You should have seen me when I was standing in the fake forbidden palace! Hengdian World Studios is the name of the crazy movie studio that ‘rebuild’ the forbidden city for cinematic purposes. And not only Beijing, but they also copied some buildings from Xi’An, Hongkong, Guangzhou and other cities. I didn’t know this, but quite a few big movie titles were completely or partly shot here: Gong Li’s THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN, Zhen Kaige’s horrible THE PROMISE and last but not least Zhang Yimou’s latest drama THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. And countless chinese TV series, as it seems.

The father of my wife’s cousin had his 50th birthday during the national october holiday, so we traveled once again to our relatives in Ningbo. It was still hot there and dry, so we encountered really comfortable weather. The extremely humid Shanghai didn’t please us very much during the last weeks, did it? During our time there in Ningbo we didn’t only go to above mentioned movie studios, but we also visited a beautiful lake near the city as well as a tea mountain.

Perfect for me, as I was able to go nuts with my Nikon D50 and shoot an insane amount of pictures. I shot all in RAW mode in order to be able to add a nice HDR makeover to them. You can see them later on below. But since the scenery was so gorgeous already, I decided not to overdo the HDR effect like in my Visual OverKILL! set and used very soft filters.

And there’s some other positive news: We sold the first Sinico machine to a customer in Shijiazhuang! After almost a year we finally reached the big first step. From now on, we really hope business will be smoother. My wife joins our newly opened company now and together we will make sure that only the best machine tools are running in China. But more about our new company when I finally had time to put a website together. Design is on the way, but programming and filling it with content takes a lot of time.

Also, we’re coming to Germany on christmas! And we’ll go to Italy after new year, too! I had to pick up a good friend today and his girlfriend who came for a visit to Shanghai. We’ll go to Sanya on Hainan island together next week! I am so busy, the only time left to blog is when I am ‘offline’ in a train from Ningbo to Shanghai, like in this very moment. I guess the only reason why I even had time to work on pictures was because the internet in the relatives home wasn’t working most of the time.

I am happy that the slow summer is finally over and that things now really seem to move forward. Makes you feel very good, safe and secure. So stay tuned for more soon!